Room with a View

The results are in! Congratulations to the following artists on winning Room’s fourth Cover Art Contest! You can find the first place winner’s work on the cover of our very next issue, 42.2, and the second place winner featured in the same issue. We want to give a huge shout-out to our judge Syrus Marcus Ware for going through the pool of submissions and determining the shortlist and winners. And thank you to all who submitted and shared... more

Room’s forth cover art contest closed earlier this year and here are the thirteen shortlisted artworks by twelve different artists! We had the honour of having Syrus Marcus Ware—visual artist, activist, curator and educator—judge our contest this time around. Stay tuned as we are announcing the top three artworks next week.

Gibson is a Vancouver-based artist and educator whose work plunges into the fraught territory of school texts and history books with a sewing needle and re-works historical Canadian texts with black thread in order to revise our ideas of history, nationhood, and how we read. Through altered book sculptures that ensnare the texts with braids and thread, redacted texts, and reprints of old children’s readers, Gibson’s work asks us to consider... more

In addition to Afua Cooper and Shauntay Grant, two of the writers featured in “20 Black Writers to Read All Year Round”, Nova Scotia has been home to many Black poets and novelists. Here is a list of some of our favourite emerging and established writers from the African Nova Scotian community. (Photo: Abena Beloved Green).

At Room, we don’t just look to the past but we also look to the future and it’s looking very bright. Here are some of our favourite black emerging writers who you should be paying attention to. Image: Chimedum Ohaegbu.

Each year when February rolls around there is a sudden influx of content, online, in libraries and elsewhere, featuring black writers, artists, activists and historical moments and figures. Much of the focus looks to the past and while that’s important, we at Room want to also centre writers in the here and now, and also look to the future. Here is a list of some of our most beloved black Canadian women and non-binary writers to enjoy all... more

The long-listed short forms entries are finally here! Due to the changes to our contest calendar last fall, we held two short forms contests in 2018. We will be announcing the shortlisted pieces as chosen by our esteemed judge, Hiromi Goto, next week.

Join us at Massy Books on Saturday, March 2, 7pm for the launch of Ayelet Tsabari's intimate new memoir in essays, The Art of Leaving. Novelist Gurjinder Basran will lead a conversation with Tsabari about her work.